Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Revised)

Summary:

Newt Scamander's classic compendium of magical creatures has delighted generations of wizards and witches, and led many youngsters into the beautifully weird world of magizoology - including Beatrix Willoughby! After almost twenty years of careful observation and research, these two celebrated magizoologists have collaborated to release an updated edition of Mr. Scamander's seminal text.

Curious about how the Hungarian Horntail hunts, or why the mooncalf dances? Read on and discover just how strange and fantastic our fellow creatures can be!

Notes:

Chapter Text

About the Authors

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them represents the fruit of many years’ travel and research. I look back across the years to the seven-year-old wizard who spent hours in his bedroom dismembering Horklumps and I envy him the journeys to come: from darkest jungle to brightest desert, from mountain peak to marshy bog. I have visited lairs, burrows, and nests across five continents, observed the curious habits of magical beasts in a hundred countries, witnessed their powers, gained their trust, and, on occasion, beaten them off with my travelling kettle.

I was commissioned back in 1918 by Mr Augustus Worme of Obscurus Books, who was kind enough to ask whether I would consider writing an authoritative compendium of magical creatures for his publishing house. I was then but a lowly Ministry of Magic employee and leapt at the chance both to augment my pitiful salary of two sickles a week and to spend my holidays travelling the globe in search of new magical species. The rest, as they say, is history.

It is my fondest hope that a new generation of witches and wizards will find in these pages fresh reason to love and protect the incredible beasts with whom we share magic.

- Newt Scamander

As a child growing up in a mixed family, I devoured magical and mundane fairytales and mythology. I loved the stories, but I found myself focusing more and more on the variety of wondrous creatures that appeared in their pages. When, at age eight, my mother gifted me with her battered copy of Newt Scamander’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, I knew instantly what I wanted to do with my life.

Now, almost twenty years later, I am myself an accomplished magizoologist who has travelled to the far corners of the world, attempting to learn more about the fascinating beasts Mr Scamander introduced me to all those years ago. I spent hours crouched in blinds hoping for a glimpse of fur or feathers, battled dehydration, disease, and more than a few hungry critters, and in the end was rewarded with a better understanding of magical creatures and a close friendship with the very man who set me on this path.

This new text, the fourth edition of Mr Scamander’s seminal work, is the result of that friendship, and I can only thank him for allowing me the opportunity to craft it with him.